vN The First Machine Dynasty(40)

Amy stood up to find her work uniform. Humans tended to overestimate the failsafe's properties. Saying that she was helplessly attracted to organics was just silly: she'd felt absolutely nothing for her prison guard. And she didn't find Rick or Melissa very cute, either, or the boys who sometimes chased her and tried to flip up her skirt during the walk between the classroom and the music studio at school. They had always seemed so surprised when she ran away.



"I think the failsafe is different from love," Amy said carefully. "I think it just makes us sick. It hurts us to see someone else getting hurt."



"You have a humane response to inhuman behaviour." Shari blinked. She stared at her cigarette as though it were the one who had spoken. "Whoa. That was deep. Especially for me."



According to the customer service training game, the Electric Sheep was steadily growing into one of the most popular chains on the West Coast. While vN could find food in urban grocery and convenience stores, restaurants rarely had more than one or two items on the menu that they could eat. The Sheep had further broken down barriers by incorporating mandatory daycare for vN children. Doing so kept vN from running away to iterate, and it helped to train new vN in a job, so they wouldn't wander homeless and aimless without skills. This was a problem Amy had known about only vaguely, from media and from the occasional glimpse of silently staring vN on street corners and in parks. She hadn't really needed to consider it until now – now she was one of them.

Now she wondered how Javier did it. He'd made it look so easy, shifting easily between escaping and stealing and iterating and running, and now that she was stuck in the same situation, she had no clue how to go about it. Maybe he was just that lucky. Or maybe he got jobs in between – maybe even at the Sheep, where there was a whole system in place to help look after new iterations. The daycare took up a full third of the basement, being separated from the break room by an accordion wall and populated by tiny vN children playing old bargain bin cooking games or taking food handler permit tests from chunky plastic readers.



The iterations were better behaved than the customers. The Sheep felt like a gaming channel made physical: yelling, swearing, laughing, and a lot of bragging. Shari zoomed by on her roller skates, occasionally crashing into her own customers or reaching over booths to give hugs and kisses to her favourite people. The night shift was her domain. "I'm nocturnal," she'd told Amy as she zipped by in search of a Rusty Innards: a dish of deep-fried chicken knuckles coated in peanut flakes. Then she had taken it upon herself to introduce Amy to every single table in the place and show off Amy's nurse costume.



"That's how her model started out, you know," Shari told the customers. "Nurses."



Nurses, to Amy's knowledge, did not dress in tiny white dresses with folded paper caps that clipped into one's hair with pins. Nor did they wear ribboned stockings that folded over the knee, or patent leather loafers. The nurses Amy had seen (in shows, at least) wore pyjamas and sneakers – very comfortable, very durable. The costume's only nod to reality was the pair of gloves Amy hid her damaged hand under.



Before Amy's first shift started, Shari handed her over to Mack, the assistant manager. Mack was about six months old. He had come straight out of the Electric Sheep generational training program, having been born at another branch on the other side of the Cascades. Maybe it was because he'd never really been anywhere but the Sheep, but he was the quickest and most cheerful server Amy had ever seen. He was the one who first showed her the menu and told her to familiarize herself with it. Luckily, this involved more eating.



Like the Rusty Innards, all the items on the menu had goofy names that somehow related to robots, although Amy sometimes didn't understand the references. There was a cocktail called Tears in the Rain, for example, that she had no clue about. But it was meant for humans, so it didn't matter. Most other items came in both organic and synthetic versions: the organic Ziggurat was a tower of alternating fried chicken and waffles glazed in butter and maple syrup, while the synthetic version was shaped the same with similar textures but made primarily out of aluminium ore. The organic Hasta la Vista was a breakfast burrito with chorizo and black bean salsa; the synthetic version contained a large serving of iron.



Amy liked the Toaster Party best. She had always enjoyed the vN French toast that her dad made on Saturday mornings, and it seemed like it could only improve with ham and eggs sandwiched inside. Granted, the toast wasn't really toast, and the ham wasn't ham, and the eggs weren't eggs, and the whole dish wasn't really her dad's creation, but when she closed her eyes and bit down, it was the closest she could come to home.